We have tried on 3 occasions to get the ownership transferred for our listing. It was set up by a yellow pages rep years ago who is no longer working for the company, as far as we know that company has deleted his email address and therefore a reply is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.

He has never responded and will never be able to respond.

The verification request to make the transfer was sent to you from patrick@the24mediaagency.com

Google then mailed out a postcard to our business, we entered the verification code and a duplicate listing was created that can not be activated due to it being a duplicate.

We don't want a duplicate. We want the original.

We did it again, this time making sure to choose more carefully that we want to take back the ownership of the existing listing.

We got a new post card. We verified that post card. Then received a message that the listing ownership is registered to a different person and we would need to wait 7 days to see what happens.

We waited and tried again.

On the third attempt we received an email asking us to reply from a domain level email .

We did admin@a1securityalarms.com and that bounced. Google does not receive email at this address.

Now we are here.

Here's a copy of the 3rd response from Google My Business support. I think this one is hopeful. However when you read it closely it says I will be happy to assist you in transferring the "DUPLICATE" listing.

Who needs a duplicate listing? It's no good. We need our LIVE or ACTIVE listing. The one that we can add photos and update our business hours on.

I'm not 100% sure if she meant to say help us obtain the duplicate listing because we already have access to that one, only you can't do anything with it as it can't be made live since it's a duplicate.

That makes sense to us. We never intended to create a duplicate. We only verified the original post card to prove we are authorized. And that created a duplicate.

Hello , Thank you for contacting Google My Business Support. After having investigated into your account, I could view more than one Google business listing by the same business name and as per your request, I would be happy to assist you with the ownership transfer of the duplicate page to your account.

However, in order for us to proceed further with the request, we would request you to send us an email authorization from the corporate domain. Please reply to this email with the authorization and I would make sure you get the claim of the page in no time.

For more understanding, you can read through our New Google My Business feature & GMB Help Center to understand the product better and follow us on our official blog for regular updates.

We did reply (attemped) to Sherly as she requested that we send an email request to you to send us an email authorization from the corporate domain.

We took the email address above local-help@google.com and sent a message from the corporate domain as requested: admin@a1securityalarms.com we get a "oops" message that you can't reply to this email address.

So we are back to square 1. Nowhere.

Please someone help clear up what needs to be done.

I have created a new Google account using our domain email admin@a1securityalarms.com

However, our original request to transfer to patrick@the24mediaagency.com still stands as the correct account that we wish it to be transferred to if possible. If that can not be done, then please transfer it to the admin@a1securityalarms.com account.

GMB Ownership transfer issues

James thank you for the reply. I'll try it again but the problem is I have done this multiple times (3x). It goes nowhere. I posted above where I was asked to "reply" to the email and that email is returned from Google saying it can not accept emails to this address.

So I have little hope for the newly added point #8 You can now appeal from the rejection email. I was actually instructed to reply to the email from the admin@domain.com email address (which is not the email by the way that I want to use to manage the account). But okay, so that makes sense. You want to see that I can send and receive an email from the domain level. I did. It bounced.

Now the only reply to this is you and I'm basically told...go do it again.

It's just such a frustrating thing to go round and round on such a stupid, trivial thing as verifying a listing. I wish that Google could just get it together. It honestly makes me think they don't really care about how frustrating this is to business owners. Obviously if they did, they would figure out a less time wasting method to deal with the problem.

Anyway, sorry if this sounds ungrateful for the reply. I will try again and thank you for taking a moment to reply with a couple of links.

GMB Ownership transfer issues

I went through a similar situation, but think I finally got it solved. I agree, it's frustrating that it takes so much time, and since this is a new type of ownership transfer system, it will mostly likely have its bugs along the way. After discussing this topic in depth with GMB Support, I've found that the new system does create a "duplicate" but this is simply a shell. Think of it as you taking the contents of your house and moving it to a new house. That's eventually what will be done with this new process.

I agree with James. Request primary ownership access of all of the listings they seem to have created, and then request to merge them all. Google's system doesn't allow duplicates, as long as they're aware of them. The new system had me scratching my head for a few weeks until I realized it really does work if you just follow their instructions.